Managing identity information

Making transactions easier and more rewarding, by facilitating new and exciting services will require better, unobtrusive ways of managing our identity information. Identity management is about knowing who you are doing business with, sharing only as much identity information as is required to establish the right level of mutual trust.

One day, you will control your own identity                                                    Identity Management is about knowing who you are doing business with, sharing only as much identity information as is required to establish the right level of mutual trust. It is about reducing risk, but also about making transactions
easier and more rewarding, by facilitating new and exciting services.

It usually involves entering passwords and other personal information, but biometrics have often been used where a particularly high level of trust in someone’s identity is required. Unfortunately we are all facing increasing security threats, from fraudsters, hackers and even hostile Governments. There are frequent press reports highlighting the risks of storing identity data, including recent publicity surrounding Google and the ‘harvesting’ of personal data from Facebook. Yet customers and service providers want to benefit from easy to use new services without repeatedly entering identification data.

So is there light at the end of the tunnel? What if we could maintain and control a single secure set of data about our identity, preferences and so on, yet selectively share it with service providers of our choice? Anything from entertainment and shopping to energy providers and government?

Build on apps we already trust
Early steps are being taken towards this vision. One involves building on applications in which we currently store identity information – our communication tools. An example is Google, who are developing an interface for Gmail allowing
users to take their data securely from site to site, to enable innovative new services. An important outcome is intended to be an industry standard for secure and selective sharing of identity data which could enable explosive growth of
innovative services.

What about service providers we already trust?
A future step is likely to be the establishment of ‘identity management services’. Rather than build on a set of data within a current application, this would move all
identity data into a secure repository, with rules set by the individual concerned, governing what can be shared with whom, under what circumstances. Patents have been filed for ‘personal identity servers’ which would undertake this role, but it is likely that we will choose to give this role to a trusted provider of our choice in future. Your bank? Google? Amazon? Your mobile phone provider? Or even
the government – several councils are already trialling a system in which people will be able to store, manage and share their basic non-financial data.

Anyone interested in creating exciting, innovative services should be aware of emerging identity management technologies such as LDAP/OAuth integration, and (in the public sector) the UK Government’s PSN vision for identity management.

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